Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Good News, Bad News

Good News:You are flying north from the capital city of Dushanbe to Khujand, Leninabad under the Soviets, a city sired by Alexander the Great as he wound his way south toward India. This flight will be the most breathtaking of your life, to date, as the little Yak 40 spends the entire 45 minutes grazing the snowy tops of some of the highest mountains in the world. You desperately snap photos while your eyes are busy bugging out of your head and you try to fathom these unfathomable mountains (though your high-falutin' thoughts of permanance and nature and power are drowned by the gold-toothed Tajik gleefully shouting that he is drunk, he is drunk!)

Bad News:You have developed something that the seasoned veterans of the region nonchalantly term "the Khujand Cough." You find this a demeaningly trivial term for what is clearly a tuberculosis death rattle.

Good News:You are visiting a lot of polling stations on election day, and per Central Asian tradition, you are to be drowned in tea at each visit lest you mortally offend your gracious hosts. The tea calms your ravaged bronchial cords.

Bad News:The tea, you soon find out, also means you have to visit the toilet quite frequently. You are a stupid, coughing idiot. Have you never traveled through villages before? Shouldn't you know better? And yes, I know that many of you have seen the hole-in-the-ground toilet at the bus stops when you were backpacking through Western Europe, and I assure you, you have no idea what I'm talking about with these outhouses. I can't really discuss it without a few more therapy sessions, but let's say it's deeply traumatic. Yes, I am a spoiled rotten city girl. But I'm a spoiled rotten city girl whose bare bum was hovering inches over the nether reaches of Tartarus whilst hacking up enough lung to reconstruct a working model outside of my body, so I think I deserve some credit.